News and Analysis
Womply, FundRocket Launch SMB Stimulus Program
While Congress continues to deliberate on a stimulus package that will provide as much as $400 billion in aid and loans for small businesses, tech companies that serve SMBs are stepping in to offer their own assistance packages. Among them is reputation management, CRM, and email software firm Womply, which has launched an SMB stimulus program in collaboration with its capital partner, FundRocket.
Location Leaders Step Up to the Plate
During the Covid-19 outbreak, we’re seeing tech companies step up to the plate in a mixture of altruistic and opportunistic moves. That’s everything from Comcast removing data caps to Amazon removing its paywall for streaming kids shows. But what about local specifically? Again, that’s where businesses are getting hit most.
We’ve seen moves in the local space over the past week from Facebook, Yelp, and Foursquare. Though there are several others, we’ll drill down on this representative sample. We’ll also give a shoutout to Google for its work to free up human and compute resources for local listings updates, covered Monday by Damian Rollison.
Loyalty in the Time of “Near Me” Searches, Omnichannel, and Covid-19
In addition to the opportunities and challenges that come with an omni-channel commercial ecosystem, 2020 brings to businesses the challenge of mobile search, which leads people on the go to search for “X near me” and pick the closest possible option. The new year also brought, as hardly anyone would’ve predicted months ago, an impending recession as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I caught up with Nicole Amsler, vice president of marketing at loyalty tech firm Formation.ai, to garner her insights on loyalty strategy this year.
Commentary
Is the Camera the ‘New Search Box’ for Local Discovery? Part II
It’s often said in the ad-tech world, and other sectors that are reliant on data, that “Content is King, but Data is God.” This is increasingly true in local ad-tech and martech given the need for “ground-truth” conversions to attribute ROI. And it will equally apply in local AR.
AR and VR — Will Local Advertisers Bite?
Local advertising is a $150 billion market, and is particularly conducive to AR, given the technology’s ability to qualify purchase decisions in the commerce-heavy offline world. There will be a land grab for this digital real estate as mobile AR gains consumer traction. There will be also questions about who “owns” that virtual space.
How Brands Determine Their Local Marketing Effectiveness
Website analytics are the most popular means of evaluating local marketing for multi-location brands. While that’s a logical tactic for analyzing digital marketing and advertising effectiveness, it hardly presents the full picture of multichannel marketing or online-to-offline attribution.
Latest Posts
A Promising New Start on News Collaboration, but There’s Another Non-Starter as Well
Next week, the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in suburban North Jersey will launch a local/national partnership project that could promote collaboration between news organizations. Meanwhile, a newspaper in Milwaukee could benefit from this kind of collaboration.
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Boosts Brands’ Customer Service, AI-Powered Assistants on the Rise
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Useful for Social and Marketing, Instagram Now Helps Brands with Customer Service, Too… NuTonomy Debuts Self-Driving Cabs, Beating the Likes of Uber and Google to the Punch… Digital Media Specialist Warns Against the Hazards of ‘Over-Targeting’…
Pitney Bowes MD: Data Integration Sets the Best Location Companies Apart
What makes location data actionable and location-based marketing effective — and what do recent success stories like Pokemon Go foretell for the location data industry? Street Fight recently caught up with Joe Francica, managing director of geospatial solutions at Pitney Bowes, to talk about the best practices in location data.
Bringing Brands Into the Fold, inMarket Touts Its ‘Three-Sided’ Beacon Network
inMarket’s strategic product is not the app, the value is created by their network. Their network links dozens of publishers’ apps to retailers that host inMarket beacons and, the third stakeholder in the network, the brands, whose products are being promoted. In this video, CEO Todd DiPaola talks about the importance of this network.
Street Fight Daily: Google to Penalize Intrusive Mobile Ads, Facebook Improves Slideshow Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… As Mobile Ads Grow More Crucial, Google Pledges to Crack Down on ‘Intrusive Interstitials’… Facebook Improves Its ‘Lightweight Video’ Slideshow Ads, Provides Support for Mobile Ad Creation… Most U.S. Publishers Rely on Both Ad Support, Subscriptions…
Factual’s Rob Jonas: Location Tech Still Has Some Big Problems to Solve
Factual has been working over the past year to build out location data partnerships with a variety of agencies and brands. We recently caught up with Rob Jonas, the company’s SVP of revenue, to talk about where Factual sees local heading and why the location data space isn’t as crowded as general adtech.
7 Ways National Brands Can Localize Email Marketing Campaigns
Going local with an email campaign can be as simple as segmenting lists by city and including the addresses of local stores or as involved as editing the copy to reflect regional purchasing trends and language dialects. The end goal remains the same: to ground the business in the local community and give customers a sense of trust.
After the Brand Battle: The Final Score
The nine Brand Battles demonstrated true commitment to local branding by nearly all of the companies that competed – but fights over best data quality, superior customer engagement and reviews were intense, and the scores were close. Out of the five areas where Brandify collected data, the point of attack in local SEO and advertising proved that a clear strategy equals clear winners…
Street Fight Daily: Lyft Disputes Sale Report, OpenStreetMap Debuts Crowdsourced Street View
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Factual’s Rob Jonas: Location Tech Still Has Some Big Problems to Solve… Lyft President Says Company Was Never Looking for a Buyer… Many Businesses Can’t Assess the Digital Customer’s Experience…
Tackling the Problem of Measurement in Local
“Google’s always had the disadvantage of being a more complex and opaque product than Facebook,” writes David Mihm, “but it feels like they’ve made almost zero progress on this front in the last eight years.”
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AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature